Drama Criticism | Artaud, Antonin - Z. Bart Thornton (essay date March 1997)

Z. Bart Thornton (essay date March 1997)

“Linguistic Disenchantment and Architectural Solace in DeLillo and Artaud,” in Mosaic, Vol. 30, No. 1, March, 1997, pp. 97-112.

[In the following essay, Thornton argues that in their work both Artaud and the novelist Don DeLillo transform language into an architecture of sounds.]

Contemporary literary criticism and modern philosophy are rife with architectural metaphors: just as literary critics speak of surfaces and structures, foundations, frames, and fissures, so philosophers from Kant to Heidegger to Derrida have invoked structural concepts in their theorizing. Without the architectural figure, as Mark Wigley has claimed, much of Heidegger's work would be groundless: “It is not that [Heidegger] simply theorizes architecture as such, but that theorizing is itself understood in architectural terms” (7). It is only recently, however, that critics have begun to focus...

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